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People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you

People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google Fi, sign up today, its super easy! Except I already have google fi. Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).

pydry 6y ago
>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while. You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way? I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
  - pydry 6y ago
    No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway. If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized. They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
    - granzymes 6y ago
      Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.
      - pydry 6y ago
        I've never understood people who stock up on baked beans and hide in bunkers either. You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
        rexpop 6y ago
        > right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days Compared to WHEN? And based on what sources?
      - brigandish 6y ago
        Risk is not only an estimate of the extent of harm if something happens but the likelihood of it happening, hence they're not prepping for Doomsday - which would be fairly pointless - but worse case scenario, of which there are several vying for the title of worst case, each with varying chance. I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        That's why individial self-hosting isn't a good defense - it only works if it's widespread. If half the population uses GenericPrivateITservice then the government can't crack down on those users. People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
      - AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
        I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that. When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable. My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages. It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc. It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another. What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails. When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
  - garbagetime 6y ago
    >Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way? Why?
    - Const-me 6y ago
      When people are saying they legally kill other people for their political views, that's often a fake. What often happens, no one cares about political views, people just using the tool for profit, revenge, career, or lulz. Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
  - henearkr 6y ago
    There are providers (not free, though), like ProtonMail, who store your data encrypted, in a fashion that would prevent this threat model. I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
- njacobs5074 6y ago
  If the fascists deem you undesirable, they won’t need your email history. If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    I thought the point of the internet is that it removes, to an extent, the friction of distance, meaning that the circles you move in may not be local to you. In the past, if I wanted to chat about politics I would have to do it with someone local or someone face to face. The postal service removed some of that friction, and now there is far less friction than that. I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
    - njacobs5074 6y ago
      What you say is true. I think the challenge is not only what you say but also what you don’t say or do? In other words, do you say the “right” things, do you go to the same church, the same sports club, and so on. It doesn’t take much for someone to be the wrong kind of neighbor once the fear takes over was my point.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Do you think a fascist government could actually come to power if they had to exploit the 15 largest tech companies? We're in an oligopoly, the 15 tech companies have far more power than any president.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    IMO: I'm not sure I want the 15 largest tech companies having as much policy influence across the globe as they do. For that reason, it may be reasonable to 1) resist them, 2) encourage others to resist them.
SahAssar 6y ago
> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose. These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.
jszymborski 6y ago
No, we care when those companies are giant multinational monopolies. Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing. Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying up all the things I do so that they might broker that information to commercial interests, or more nefariously, to further cement their choke-hold on the ever-increasing industries which they've a financial stake in. One of those situations is clever business, the other is an Orwellian hellscape. I'll take every opportunity I can to rid myself of that second pursuer, thank you very much.
- nickelpro 6y ago
  In either case I still bought my slacks from the clothing store, my pint from the tavern, and slept soundly in my bed. You object to the company having your information, I object to it being used to impact my life. I don't give a damn about them just having it. And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
  - jszymborski 6y ago
    Alphabet uses this information to expand its influence, be it soft power, political power, or economic power. For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP. The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on. Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future. This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it. I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day. https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washington-lobbyists-spend/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto... https://whyprivacymatters.org/ https://whyprivacymatters.org/ https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
nuker 6y ago
> has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Minority Report? Just give it some time.
bad_user 6y ago
Ads can be contextual, served based on the content you view, and Google's own Ad Words does in fact just that, as they serve ads based on your search keywords, and that's their biggest revenue source. People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense. --- > Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? This is a false choice. Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too. --- > Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently). That's irrelevant. The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona. And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that. China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc. But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online? There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-) [1] https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/ https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-...
- henearkr 6y ago
  In this case you don't need to ditch Gmail, they don't use anymore this data to custom ads. However each time you visit any website, your enemies are not only Google Ads but also Criteo, Facebook, etc (and they are much much less conscientious than Google about how they use and distribute the fruits of this harvest).
  - bad_user 6y ago
    I agree. But I still think it's worth it to ditch Gmail, or at least the free version. People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it. If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain. I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.
browsergap 6y ago
I think it 's part of controlling the narrative. What if the big corps were actually behind the fetishization of and obsession with privacy and data collection? What if it acts as a distraction or cover for whatever other negative initiatives they might take? If they can control the opposition to focus on "privacy and my data versus big corp" it's a win. I think controlled opposition is an essential part of narrative management and PR strategy for entities that are large or sophisticated enough.
Maximus9000 6y ago
> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Cambridge Analytica?
- jonny_wonny 6y ago
  That had nothing to do with tracking. Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
  - Maximus9000 6y ago
    > Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen. > Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred. What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
    - judge2020 6y ago
      > What do you mean? How could CA work without any data? Tracking, in this context, means tracking behavior across other websites. CA got data that was created simply by having a Facebook account and friending other people (they used oauth/login with Facebook). Facebook would have to not have existed, or not provide as much data to third party applications, to prevent their collection.

pydry 6y ago

>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while. You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.

gkoberger 6y ago
Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way? I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
- pydry 6y ago
  No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway. If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized. They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
  - granzymes 6y ago
    Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.
    - pydry 6y ago
      I've never understood people who stock up on baked beans and hide in bunkers either. You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
      - rexpop 6y ago
        > right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days Compared to WHEN? And based on what sources?
    - brigandish 6y ago
      Risk is not only an estimate of the extent of harm if something happens but the likelihood of it happening, hence they're not prepping for Doomsday - which would be fairly pointless - but worse case scenario, of which there are several vying for the title of worst case, each with varying chance. I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      That's why individial self-hosting isn't a good defense - it only works if it's widespread. If half the population uses GenericPrivateITservice then the government can't crack down on those users. People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
    - AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
      I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that. When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable. My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages. It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc. It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another. What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails. When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
- garbagetime 6y ago
  >Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way? Why?
  - Const-me 6y ago
    When people are saying they legally kill other people for their political views, that's often a fake. What often happens, no one cares about political views, people just using the tool for profit, revenge, career, or lulz. Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
- henearkr 6y ago
  There are providers (not free, though), like ProtonMail, who store your data encrypted, in a fashion that would prevent this threat model. I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
njacobs5074 6y ago
If the fascists deem you undesirable, they won’t need your email history. If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.
- brigandish 6y ago
  I thought the point of the internet is that it removes, to an extent, the friction of distance, meaning that the circles you move in may not be local to you. In the past, if I wanted to chat about politics I would have to do it with someone local or someone face to face. The postal service removed some of that friction, and now there is far less friction than that. I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
  - njacobs5074 6y ago
    What you say is true. I think the challenge is not only what you say but also what you don’t say or do? In other words, do you say the “right” things, do you go to the same church, the same sports club, and so on. It doesn’t take much for someone to be the wrong kind of neighbor once the fear takes over was my point.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Do you think a fascist government could actually come to power if they had to exploit the 15 largest tech companies? We're in an oligopoly, the 15 tech companies have far more power than any president.
- jasonv 6y ago
  IMO: I'm not sure I want the 15 largest tech companies having as much policy influence across the globe as they do. For that reason, it may be reasonable to 1) resist them, 2) encourage others to resist them.

SahAssar 6y ago

> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose. These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.

jszymborski 6y ago

No, we care when those companies are giant multinational monopolies. Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing. Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying up all the things I do so that they might broker that information to commercial interests, or more nefariously, to further cement their choke-hold on the ever-increasing industries which they've a financial stake in. One of those situations is clever business, the other is an Orwellian hellscape. I'll take every opportunity I can to rid myself of that second pursuer, thank you very much.

nickelpro 6y ago
In either case I still bought my slacks from the clothing store, my pint from the tavern, and slept soundly in my bed. You object to the company having your information, I object to it being used to impact my life. I don't give a damn about them just having it. And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
- jszymborski 6y ago
  Alphabet uses this information to expand its influence, be it soft power, political power, or economic power. For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP. The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on. Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future. This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it. I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day. https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washington-lobbyists-spend/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto... https://whyprivacymatters.org/ https://whyprivacymatters.org/ https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...

nuker 6y ago

> has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Minority Report? Just give it some time.

bad_user 6y ago

Ads can be contextual, served based on the content you view, and Google's own Ad Words does in fact just that, as they serve ads based on your search keywords, and that's their biggest revenue source. People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense. --- > Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? This is a false choice. Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too. --- > Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently). That's irrelevant. The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona. And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that. China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc. But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online? There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-) [1] https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/ https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-...

henearkr 6y ago
In this case you don't need to ditch Gmail, they don't use anymore this data to custom ads. However each time you visit any website, your enemies are not only Google Ads but also Criteo, Facebook, etc (and they are much much less conscientious than Google about how they use and distribute the fruits of this harvest).
- bad_user 6y ago
  I agree. But I still think it's worth it to ditch Gmail, or at least the free version. People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it. If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain. I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.

browsergap 6y ago

I think it 's part of controlling the narrative. What if the big corps were actually behind the fetishization of and obsession with privacy and data collection? What if it acts as a distraction or cover for whatever other negative initiatives they might take? If they can control the opposition to focus on "privacy and my data versus big corp" it's a win. I think controlled opposition is an essential part of narrative management and PR strategy for entities that are large or sophisticated enough.

Maximus9000 6y ago

> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Cambridge Analytica?

jonny_wonny 6y ago
That had nothing to do with tracking. Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
- Maximus9000 6y ago
  > Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen. > Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred. What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
  - judge2020 6y ago
    > What do you mean? How could CA work without any data? Tracking, in this context, means tracking behavior across other websites. CA got data that was created simply by having a Facebook account and friending other people (they used oauth/login with Facebook). Facebook would have to not have existed, or not provide as much data to third party applications, to prevent their collection.